Vickipedia

CSOMA DE KOROS, alexander, a Hungarian scholar and traveler, whose name in his own language is written Köröse Csoma Sandor, was born about 1790 at Körös in Transylvania, and educated first at the college of Nagy-Enyed, and subsequently at Göttingen, where he devoted himself with great zeal to the study of the Oriental tongues. The dream and inspiration of his boyhood was the hope of one day discovering the original home of his Magyar ancestors, and as he grew up, it became the single thought and passion of his life. In 1820, he set out on his visionary pilgrimage. After a year’s interval, his friends got a letter from him, dated Teheran, in which he expressed his conviction that the object of his search would speedily be obtained. Leaving Teheran, he wandered north-east through Little Bokhara, and at length reached Tibet, where he spent about four years (1827—1830) in the Buddhist monastery of Kanam, studying Tibetan. He soon discovered that there was little connection between that language and his native one, but still he hoped to make use of his researches, and set out for Calcutta. Here he learned, to his dismay, that the literature of Tibet was simply a translation from the Sanscrit—a language he might easily have acquired a knowledge of at home. His whole labor seemed to have been in vain. Fortunately for C., the library of the Asiatic Society of Bengal contained upwards of 1000 volumes in Tibetan which no one could catalogue. C. undertook and successfully executed the task. By the great Anglo-Indian scholars, Prinsep, Wilson, and others, he was very generously treated. He next prepared, at the expense of the government, a Tibetan grammar and dictionary (Calcutta, 1834), which was the first really accurate and valuable European work on the subject. It is still a standard treatise, and has been the guide of all good scholars since. C. wrote many articles on Tibetan literature in the Asiatic Researches, but still haunted, as of old, by the hope of discovering the early home of the Magyars, he once more set out on an expedition to the western confines of China, but died on the 11th April 1842, at Darjeeling in Sikkim.